What Advice Would You Give Young Women in the Workplace?
Back when I was in my early 20s, I worked as a bartender in London for a few months. It was a great experience — I’d just graduated from college with a comp lit degree, had no idea what I wanted to be when I “grew up” (except that it would involve writing), and was the furthest I’d ever lived from my hometown in New Jersey. I learned how to pull a pint, make change in pounds, and successfully open a bottle of champagne. I also learned how to deal with being aggressively, creepily hit on while I was trying to do my job.
Ask any woman around you if they have a story about being made to feel different, or unwanted, or unintelligent while in the workplace, and I’d be surprised if any of them didn’t have at least one (if not more) to share. My friends have been talked over in meetings, had more attention paid to their clothes than to their work, told that they’re too loud or too vocal or too “bossy.” Hillary Clinton’s being called “too ambitious.” Do these seem like small things? Sure. Taken as a whole — over a whole career of being treated differently just because of your gender — they’re not so small.
Today, we at MTV launched the 79% Work Clock, a physical clock that asks people that if women are paid only 79% of what men make, shouldn’t they only work 79% of the day? (To learn more about what the wage gap is and what you can do about it, check out this post.) It’s a tongue-in-cheek concept with real ramifications. What would happen if women stood up for their rights in the workplace? How would things change? What could we accomplish together?
We asked some of our Good Look Panelists what they wished they had known about being a woman in the workplace when they had their first jobs. We’ll be rolling out more stories on gender from our Good Look Panelists here in the coming days.
Shalyah Evans, MTV’s Girl Code:
I’ve had a lot of jobs where “dealing with creeps is just part of the job description” aka “we don’t want to do anything about you being harassed because we like money”. I’ve been asked to look the other way and just keep smiling more times than I care to count.
It takes time…to process when something negative happens, and then to decide what to do about it. I wish I had the guts to quit jobs on the spot when I know I’m uncomfortable and nothing is being done.
Eva Vega-Olds (Justice Advocate), Anti-Defamation League:
I have never worked anywhere where the top person in charge wasn’t male. I had a female supervisor who sometimes confided how hard it was to be in the room with the “leadership.” Leadership almost always means white and male, and even if doesn’t mean that… the people it is describing are always white and male. How do you see yourself as moving up when there is NO ONE that looks like you?
I wished someone told me “EVA you are not going crazy.” There is a thing called sexism and this is what it looks like: talking down to you, presuming they know something about your life or your interests even though they are way off base, recognizing that being assertive in the workplace gets called aggressive in a woman and strong and confident in a man… OMG, I wish I heard any of that.
